Submitted Entries: 655

News

Richard Hershberger has offered to supply short pieces on assorted sweet subtopics in early base ball history. The first of these, Sliding in the Amateur Era, is a 3-page summary of contemporary news accounts' evidence on sliding.

It begins: "Did base runners slide in the amateur era, and if so, how frequently? Looking at period reports, the most striking feature is that the evidence is thin. There are undoubted reports of runners sliding, but they are few and far between. The problem then is to determine if reports of sliding are rare because sliding was rare, or because it was commonplace and therefore unremarkable: are they man bites dog reports, or dog bites man? Or something in between?"

Richard Hershberger continues with his collection of data on as many early base ball clubs as he can find. At this point he has rounded up over 850 clubs that formed prior to the Civil War and that played by New York rules. Richard has generously shared his collection with Protoball, and all of the clubs are entered into the PBall Pre-Pro data base. Richard’s quest parallels the effort started in 2008 by Craig Waff to build a directory of early ball games before the War, and we are trying to systematically link clubs and games for PBall users.